Idea

I have been an EN user since Beta, and became a Premium user as soon as it was offered.

I do not understand why EN is lagging with simple security options, such as easy encryption of notes and notebooks. This really should be as easy as a Right-Click or selection in properties for a Note or Notebook.

The existing method of selecting text in a note and then using a Right-Click option to encrypt it is cumbersome at best. Yes, it is a nice feature if one wants to encrypt only a portion of a note. That's fine.

But there should be an easy way to (1) encrypt an entire note without selecting text and (2) encrypt an entire notebook.

I would be willing to pay a few bucks extra a year for this additional encryption ability. Seems this should be a no-brainier for EN, both as a tech matter and as a business/profit matter.

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I would upgrade to premium for this feature. I have sensitive information that I consolidate into a notebook, but I won't use Evernote over mobile or from my work computer because I can't encrypt that data. Heck, I'm even a little paranoid keeping my home computer unlocked when I have visitors.

-chris

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I use Evernote daily on my Windows PC, on my iPhone, and iPad. It would be great if the encryption feature would be available on the iOS devices. Being able to encrypt notes or portion of notes while on the go is essential. Hopefully Evernote will listen to its users. I have already begun looking for other options but really don't want to change if Evernote meets my needs.

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Yes, me too. Well I already a premium user (with my working account) and the only reason I use 2 account is I don't want other to see my secure note accidentally when I presenting them with my other notes.

It's even ok if it's not encrypted at all, but just need a passcode to open the notebook.

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I wasn't fully clear, I meant notebook level encryption. Paying a premium for a product such as Evernote, one simply prefers not to have to use third party products to provide things like full notebook encryption. We pay premiums so that we don't need to spend time implementing third party solutions.

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Hi - it's a phrase I use too often, but "if it were that easy, Evernote would probably have done it by now".

This is much-discussed and requested over the years - encrypting data across however many platforms Evernote now uses could mean that on some it's not possible to read data or even use Evernote. So far Evernote have seemed happy to leave it to users to find 3rd-party solutions, of which there are plenty..

But it is, in fact, quite simple:

To encrypt notes, Evernote would only have to store the password (encrypted with a master-passphrase) for the note inside the note itself. That way, the notes can be synced exactly the way they are now. The master-passphrase would be something only the user knows and never leaves his/her device; either completely new or derived from the credentials already used for evernote (username/password). You could even use different master-passphrases per notebook, which would create the illusion of the notebooks being encrypted separately.

I see no reason why this should not work cross-platform. As for sharing: for shared notebooks, the users would simply have to exchange the master-passphrase for that notebook once in person or otherwise securely. For shared notes you could do the same, or you could use public-key-encryption for the note-password: encrypt it using the other person's public key and only they can decrypt it and afterwards decrypt the note. All this could even be automated and implemented completely transparent to the user.

Which is why I for one can absolutely not understand why this has not yet been done. The lack of useful encryption is what is keeping me from actually using evernote on a more permanent basis (also the unavailabitly of a linux client but thats a different matter...).

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I may be naive, but I think zero knowledge encryption of notes and notebooks with group sharing of encrypted notes is much more valuable to business users than work chat. Of course this has to be done right and they need to hire a security expert and vet it rather than try to graft on some homemade solution that will be easily hacked. But this is the sort of feature I think users would be willing to pay. I sometimes use Lastpass to store notes on sensitive information. Lastpass note editing and attachment handling is terrible. I'm already a premium user, but I would love to be able to have Lastpass level security with Evernote level notekeeping.

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I don't understand how there are only 10 people voting for this feature, this should be at the top of the list. This is a very important feature in today's state of affairs with respect to privacy and security.

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Is it the whole idea of having encrypted notes and notebooks on Evernote dead for good?

Back in 2014, when the initial post was published, encryption was already important despite being only to a minor percentage of users. What can we say briefly about it today? Privacy is in the epicenter of tectonic moves in the technological world. Touching every aspect of our digital lives, from creating content to sharing it privately. Countless stories about leaks or accidental breaches are published every day. And we know that lots of other apps offer full encryption already, with similar services found here.

We also know the communications between Evernote clients and servers (and between our various data centers) are all encrypted. That they changed the UI to be more clear with whom a note is shared, etcetera. It's clear and nice to see that Evernote as a company does care about it. But it's time to the next step, don't you think?

We could take advantage of this phase of changes that are taking place to improve the entire platform, as well as to implement certain features that we cannot move on into the next decade without them. Would be nice to bring attention to the matter to their new CEO. It would be nice to hear an official position about it from Ian Small.

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Hi - it's a phrase I use too often, but "if it were that easy, Evernote would probably have done it by now".

This is much-discussed and requested over the years - encrypting data across however many platforms Evernote now uses could mean that on some it's not possible to read data or even use Evernote. So far Evernote have seemed happy to leave it to users to find 3rd-party solutions, of which there are plenty..

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@gazumped, but EN does provide encryption. It's just cumbersome in that one needs to select the text in a note and then right-click to encrypt. So it seems that making it easier to encrypt an entire note or notebook would not add to any issues as re cross-platform use. IMHO

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@gazumped, but EN does provide encryption. It's just cumbersome in that one needs to select the text in a note and then right-click to encrypt. So it seems that making it easier to encrypt an entire note or notebook would not add to any issues as re cross-platform use. IMHO

It's pretty easy to arm chair quarterback. Yes, EN currently provides encryption...for text only. Simply b/c text encryption exists doesn't mean that can easily be applied to an entire notebook (or even just a note) that may contain images, PDFs, MP4s, etc. and sync & work well across multiple platforms.

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There obviously isn't a technical reason why Evernote have chosen not to implement this type of encryption, so Evernote have made a design decision not to implement it.

I guess they think the complexity for users (and maybe the additional support load) combined with the reduction in search, AI and other stuff means that in the trade off between stuff encryption is currently not winning.

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Would love to hear a response from Evernote on this feature. The spin on security is quite misleading: https://evernote.com/security. The average user may see fancy terms like "TLS" and "Transport Encryption", and think that "locked cage(s)" protect their data (seriously this is the wording on the security site). They added encryption for data at rest in 2016, but this still doesn't provide the level that is necessary at this point in time. Consumers should be able to own encryption of their own notebooks (beyond just text) and it should be encrypted on the client side too.

Quote

For our data centers, we secure our infrastructure in a private, locked cage that includes 24x7x365 monitoring.

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Consumers﻿﻿﻿should be able to own the encryption of their own note﻿s.﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿

Evernote only offers a text encryption feature; consumers own the encryption key.
For note encryption, check out third party Saferoom
Another option is the native encryption in attachments; PDFs, Office/iWork documents, ...

To indicate your support for this feature request, use the voting buttons in the top left corner of the discussion.

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I use Evernote for work and personal so some personal doc notebooks should be encrypted on my work computer.

Short term, probably better to use two accounts then. You can share notebooks between accounts if need be. For example, my personal account contains lots of clipped articles relating to software development, and I naturally share that with my work account. But I don't share much else. For historical purposes, I al so share a number of work notebooks to my personal account, so that I could track my work tasks from home (now I can just access my work accounts and my personal accounts at home on the same machine, at the same time). If I need to access notes from my personal account while at work, I can always access it via my phone or via the web.

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There's no indication that Evernote is interested in encrypted notes and notebooks

It would be nice to hear from them, at least, an official statement.
Maybe even a more explanatory tutorial with options, third party apps associated with the company.
It would end up with all of those open questions regarding the subject.

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Although Ian Small is much more open to customers that I remember from his predecessors, there's a difference between sharing what Evernote is actively working on now, and explaining which features they will or will not be introducing over the next several years. Few CEOs would say 'never' to anything, but no-one is going to say "we'll have that next year" because you also never know what little challenges will get thrown in your way between now and then. Even fewer will want to open a dialogue where they say "that's not a priority", and users say "why not?" and start demanding justification for the decision. What features you see are what you have to work with.

As to offering a tutorial - that in itself is a sizeable commitment of time and effort, needs constant maintenance and invites lots of "why didn't you mention..." comments for other new apps - and what about those folks who want different features for photo storage, genealogy and coding? Are more tutorials going to be created?

IS might decide to comment here if and when he sees the thread, but I'd rather he and the team concentrate on his avowed priority of "getting Evernote back on the path of developing and shipping quality software" (which might include encryption, but I'd guess you might have to wait for the video to learn more...)